Teachable Review: What Users Like and What Costs Extra Now

If you're weighing Teachable, you're looking at a platform for selling online courses, coaching, and digital downloads through its own checkout. The thing users praise most is how quickly you can set up a course and start selling.

The complaints are just as consistent: prices and plans that changed at renewal, support that is harder to reach, and, since September 2026, a monthly fee on learners who join without paying through Teachable's checkout.

Below, you'll find what users praise and complain about, how the new usage fee works, and who Teachable fits best.

What Teachable Does and Who Uses It

Teachable is an online course platform. You use it to build courses, coaching programs, and digital downloads, then sell them through Teachable's own checkout and payment system. It is built mainly for creators, coaches, and small education businesses selling to individual learners.

Core features of Teachable:

• Course builder for video lessons, quizzes, and drip schedules.
• Coaching products and digital downloads.
• Teachable Payments, a built-in checkout that handles payments and sales tax.
• Built-in email marketing and a site builder.
• Community on the Builder plan and up, with certificates on Growth.

Teachable Plans, Prices, and the New Usage Fee

Teachable has three published plans and a custom tier. Starter is $39 a month, Builder $89, and Growth $189, or $29, $69, and $139 a month billed annually.

Each plan caps the products you can publish at 5, 10, and 50, and Starter adds a 7.5% transaction fee. Learners who buy through Teachable's checkout are unlimited on every plan.

The newer cost is the usage fee. Learners who join any other way, such as an import, the API, a manual enrollment, a $0 checkout, or a 100% coupon, cost $0.50 a month each above the first 100.

The fee is the same on every plan. Schools created since September 3, 2026 pay it now, and older schools move to it at their first renewal on or after April 30, 2027.

Teachable has no free plan. Its pricing page lists a 7-day free trial.

How Teachable Users Rate It Overall

Teachable's ratings vary widely across review sites: 4.2 out of 5 on Capterra from 185 reviews, 3.8 on G2 from 53, 3.3 on Trustpilot from about 1,110, and 8.9 out of 10 on TrustRadius from 27.

The Trustpilot split shows why. 38% of its reviews are five stars and 40% are one star. Users who sell through the checkout and rarely need support tend to be happy.

Users who hit a billing change, a payout hold, or a support ticket that sits unanswered tend to be very unhappy.

Teachable is simple to start on, and most complaints arrive later, at renewal or when something breaks. The strengths come first, then the drawbacks.

Where Teachable Earns Its Praise

1. Fast to set up and start selling. Ease of use is the most common praise across review sites.

It came up in about 15 of the 25 most recent Capterra reviews we read, and an associate director on Capterra wrote in February 2026: "I find Teachable's interface and course features the most intuitive."

2. A checkout that converts. Buyers go from a link to a purchase without extra steps. u/blabel75, who moved from Teachable to Skool, found new course sales dropped because buyers had to be approved before purchasing:

With Teachable, they just went to the link and bought.

u/blabel75

r/Teachable

3. Payments and sales tax handled for you. Teachable Payments processes cards and handles tax, so you don't need a separate tool for either. On r/Teachable, the same user noted that Teachable collects US sales tax "automatically and remits it to the individual states."

4. Support agents who get praised by name. Support draws criticism overall, but individual agents earn praise. Rebbecca A Harris wrote on Trustpilot in October 2026: "Sunny answered quickly and made sure I understood the answers I was given."

Where Teachable Users Run Into Trouble

1. Prices and plans that change at renewal. This is the most common complaint, and it shows up on every review site and across r/Teachable and r/elearning.

I couldn't take it anymore. The ever increasing fees. They've tripled for me in the past four years.

u/blabel75

r/Teachable

In mid-2025, Teachable moved customers on retired plans to Growth.

The email it sent, shared on r/Teachable, set the new price at "$189 per month on a monthly plan, or $1,668 per year on an annual plan." In a separate r/elearning thread, u/JJKnowsTheWay wrote that "Teachable has all the features I need but they keep doubling the price."

2. A fee on learners who don't pay through checkout. The September 2026 usage fee lands on anyone who gives access away: a free lead-magnet course, a donated class, or a 100% coupon.

One creator who donated a class to a charity bundle described the effect on r/elearning:

I think I am going to be able to squeak by this year but I won't be able to donate a class again or do a free lead magnet without paying dearly.

u/Strict_Pack_1777

r/elearning

3. Support that is harder to reach. Capterra rates Teachable's customer service 3.8 out of 5, below its overall 4.2, and reviewers describe chatbot-first replies and slow ticket turnaround.

Tech support use to be amazing...several years ago. Awesome chat feature, connected to a human in like 5 minutes that could help. Tech support now takes 2-3 days to reply with one message.

u/Fair-Ad9295

r/Teachable, seven-year Teachable user

On Trustpilot in October 2026, a reviewer named Sher wrote: "Chatbot said they'd refer to a human and I waited 45 minutes before giving up." On r/elearning, u/aocnandan, who left Teachable in January 2024, said: "I have unresolved tickets that are older than 2 years!"

4. Reliability and payout holds. Bugs, outages, and slow pages came up in about 8 of the 25 recent Capterra reviews we read.

Payout delays came up in about 4, including a CEO who wrote in July 2025 that Teachable had been "holding over a month's worth of my business revenue without releasing the funds."

5. Limited design control. Customization draws steady criticism. Michael H., a digital marketing strategist, wrote on G2 in November 2025: "The site customization options feel somewhat limited."

Should You Choose Teachable?

Your answer depends on how you sell and how many learners you give access to for free.

Teachable is a good fit if:

• Most of your learners buy through Teachable's checkout.
• You sell a handful of products and want setup to be quick.
• You want payments and sales tax handled without a separate tool.

Teachable may not be a good fit if:

• You give courses away, import learners, or run 100% coupons at scale.
• You need fast, human support when something breaks.
• You want detailed control over your site's design.

Using Teachable to Train Your Customers

Teachable now markets a customer training product.

Its customer training page promises you can "Upload CSVs or add an entire customer cohort in minutes." On the published plans, every customer you add that way counts toward the usage fee above 100, because none of them pay through checkout.

A few facts set Teachable apart: it is built around a fast, converting checkout, it handles payments and sales tax, and it caps the products you can publish on each plan.

Teachable is a weaker fit for training customers on your own software. That kind of training needs product walkthroughs that change with every release, delivery inside your product, and completion data your customer success team can see.

It also needs pricing that does not charge for every customer you enroll.

For SaaS teams that train customers on their product, Trainn is an AI-powered product video and guide creation platform.

Its AI video agent reads a screen recording as a workflow rather than a sequence of frames, then produces a narrated video, a step-by-step guide, and an interactive walkthrough from it, with the voiceover, zooms, and captions done for you. Trainn then delivers that training in a customer academy.

Four differences map onto the drawbacks above:

• The Academy is priced as a flat fee against a monthly active learner tier, so customers you enroll in bulk and who never log in do not add to the bill.
• One screen recording becomes a video, a guide, and a walkthrough, and when the product changes you replace one clip rather than re-record the lesson.
• Trainn MCP, included on every plan, connects Claude, ChatGPT, or Notion to your library. The assistant drafts an onboarding course from existing content, and flags and revises stale lessons from your release notes, all as drafts you review.
• Training ships to an Academy, a branded Knowledge Hub, and in-app tutorials, with learner analytics and Salesforce and HubSpot integration that show who finished.

Groundplan, which builds estimating software for construction contractors, onboards more than 200 new customers a month with a two-person training team. It built its customer academy on Trainn so the same team could create the videos and host the courses:

We didn't want one software to make videos and another to host the course. We just wanted to do it all within the same platform.

Gareth Morris

General Manager, Groundplan

Read the customer story ›

If the goal is training customers on your product, start a free trial or compare plans before you commit.

Explore more Trainn customer stories to see how SaaS teams use Trainn in practice.

Teachable Review FAQs

Is Teachable worth it?

It depends on how you sell. Teachable rates 4.2 out of 5 on Capterra and 3.8 on G2. Users praise how quickly they can set up and sell through its checkout. The common complaints are price and plan changes at renewal, slow support, and a new fee on learners who join without paying through checkout.

How much does Teachable cost?

Teachable's Starter plan is $39 a month with a 7.5% transaction fee, Builder is $89, and Growth is $189, or $29, $69, and $139 a month billed annually. Plans cap published products at 5, 10, and 50. Learners added without a paid checkout cost $0.50 a month each above 100.

Does Teachable charge for free students?

Yes, under its current usage fee policy. Learners who pay through Teachable's checkout are free and unlimited. Learners added by import, API, manual enrollment, $0 checkout, or a 100% coupon cost $0.50 a month each above 100. Schools created before September 3, 2026 move to this policy at renewal on or after April 30, 2027.

Does Teachable have a free plan?

No. Teachable does not offer a free plan, and its pricing page lists a 7-day free trial on its paid plans instead. The lowest paid plan is Starter at $39 a month, or $29 a month billed annually, and it adds a 7.5% transaction fee on sales.

What are the main complaints about Teachable?

The most common are price increases and plan changes at renewal, support that is hard to reach and slow to reply, and the usage fee on learners who join without paying. Some reviewers also report bugs, payout delays, and limited control over their site's design.

What is the best Teachable alternative for customer training?

If you train customers on your own software rather than sell courses, Trainn is the closest fit. It turns one screen recording into a video, a guide, and an interactive walkthrough, and delivers them in an academy, a Knowledge Hub, and in-app, priced on monthly active learners rather than per enrolled customer.